Wisdom VS Knowledge | Is there a difference?

Is there a difference between wisdom and knowledge? This is a subjective question, therefore the answer can be yes or no, depending on your beliefs. The writer of this blog post, however, believes there is a gigantic difference. As much as I’d love to be having a water balloon fight in the beautiful weather (visiting family in Seattle again), I’ve decided to treat my reader’s with this special topic today!

To begin my argument supporting that there is a difference between these two intellectual factors, I’ll now display academically accepted definitions of the words.

Knowledge = facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education.

Wisdom = the ability to use your knowledge and experience to make good decisions and judgments.

Already you can see a slight difference, as wisdom requires knowledge but knowledge doesn’t necessarily require wisdom. I like to think of knowledge as information, and as we all know, information has the inherent ability to be incorrect sometimes. Wisdom, however, is NEVER INCORRECT! Wisdom always tells us the right coarse of action, even though we may choose not to take it. Knowledge, being incorrect or false, has a chance of leading us down the wrong road. We must be careful where we get our knowledge from because it is a thing that everyone has. But wisdom is something you can only get from rare sources, as not everyone has it.

I’m going to go a little beyond the board here when I say knowledge was invented by man. Since everything is a perception reliant on the law of relativity, our knowledge of everything is merely an illusion. For example, we say the sun is bright because our eyes hurt when we look at it. But how can we really know the sun it bright, as there might be other alien races who consider it rather dim?

One of the greatest pieces of wisdom quoted frequently is “we know nothing!” Have you ever heard someone say that a person who thinks he knows everything has a lot to learn? Ancient wise people would always make at least two assumptions about everything, because there is always a chance that your first assumption may be wrong, so why get attached to it?

Now let me take this a little further when I wisdom was here before we were. Animals use wisdom when they rely on their instincts, because wisdom is based off of universal laws.

So what is the major difference between wisdom and knowledge?

In my opinion, in a summary, the greatest difference is that knowledge is invented by us and wisdom was here before we were. For example, your mechanic might suggest a certain type of wrench for a certain job because he has knowledge about that subject. Knowledge about cars and wrenches came after us. But such wisdom like “the last shall be first and the first shall be last” is a universal law that affects all life on Earth, and has been affecting it long before we were here. Don’t believe me? Well, next time you get on a cramped and crowded public bus, be the last one to get on and surely when it comes time to get off, you’ll be first! The same goes for sand in a bucket, or molecules on a stick.

In other words, wisdom is here whether we’re here to notice it or not, a knowledge relies on us to exist.

To learn more about the universal laws of the universe, consider watching this video!

Now feel free to disagree with me, because like I said this is all subjective. Everything I know is an illusion, even the idea of wisdom itself!